From Frost to Frigid: A Vermonter’s Journey from Florida to Antarctica

Numerous students on winter recess remain cozy at home surrounded by family and friends. However, Jacob Chalif from Vermont has motivation to embark on a flight of 10,000 miles to delve into the frosty expanses of Antarctica.

“If you’re in search of ice,” he stated earlier this month, “there’s no superior destination to obtain it.”

The 25-year-old grad student from Dartmouth College is involved in a project led by the U.S. National Science Foundation that is collecting some of the oldest ice on the planet — some over a million years old — to analyze climate change.

Researchers employ state-of-the-art techniques to monitor current climatic conditions. Yet, to investigate past epochs, they need to extract ancient ice and inspect the air bubbles and particles trapped within, as Chalif detailed during a video call from a field station situated 18 hours ahead of his home timezone in Woodstock.

“Before roughly 1900, there’s genuinely no means of knowing what our climate was like apart from examining phenomena such as ice,” he mentioned. “This provides a method to address our voids of understanding regarding Earth’s former climate, including how factors like temperature, atmospheric circulation, wind patterns, and carbon dioxide have interacted, along with how human activity has influenced this fragile equilibrium.”

Chalif’s fascination with this scientific field ignited during his childhood on Long Island, where he discovered a “glacial moraine” created after ice that once enveloped the Earth receded, leaving “a mass of sediment where I spent my early years.”

Upon entering Dartmouth, Chalif stumbled upon the National Science Foundation’s Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (or COLDEX), which has united more than a dozen higher education institutions — from his own school to as far as the University of Washington — to propel polar research forward.

Achieving a spot through a rigorous selection process, Chalif boarded a flight in Boston last November, proceeding to San Francisco, then New Zealand, and ultimately, after approximately 36 hours in transit, arrived in Antarctica.

The Vermonter was part of a dozenresearchers who subsequently journeyed from the McMurdo Station, the largest permanent U.S. base, to establish a camp of tents, insulated sleeping bags, and drilling equipment in the Allan Hills blue ice region about 135 miles distant.

Antarctica, 1.5 times larger than the United States and cloaked almost entirely by mile-thick ice, lacks a continuous population but hosts a global roster of up to 5,000 rotating scientific research personnel, as per estimations. Most visitors arrive during the peak “summer” months of December and January, which showcase 24-hour sunlight (“you pull a hat over your face and say goodnight,” Chalif noted regarding bedtime) and the warmest temperatures of the year.

“It’s mild,” he stated. “It’s minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit almost every single day.”

During benign weather, Chalif and his team have extracted over 10,000 pounds of ice for shipping back to laboratories in the United States. Amid occasional blizzards that may endure for days, as well as during holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the eight nights of Hanukkah, they found shelter in their camp’s two heated communal tents.

“The temperature itself you can handle, but what makes it really challenging are the extremely high winds,” he explained. “We’re talking about 20 to 40 miles per hour. They tend to drain everything out of you. However, there’s something about being here that is essential to the science. You can see how all of this converges.”

Chalif’s academic investigation centers on pollution found in ice. He and Dartmouth associate professor Erich Osterberg recently led a study that uncovered signs of fossil-fuel emissions appearing in samples from Alaska and Greenland, present in quantities substantial enough to modify their atmospheric chemistry.

“The reality that these isolated regions of the Arctic exhibit these unmistakable human traces indicates that there is truly no part of this planet we haven’t impacted,” Chalif remarked upon the report’s release.

Chalif is scheduled to return to Dartmouth in February to finish the final year and a half of his master’s degree. He aims to work with the ice he has gathered, as well as enhance his indigenous survival capabilities.

“I did not anticipate two months in still possessing a smile,” he mentioned from the field. “However, there’s no such thing as poor weather, only inadequate clothing or equipment. I’ve added a few layers here, but I had this inherent sense for how to manage it. The skills obtained from facing winters in Vermont have proven invaluable.”